The itchy-bitchy blog entry

I'm buried in this index. It stinks. I'm gritting my teeth all the way through it. Total free time yesterday and today: well, right now. That's about it.

Every time I do this, I swear I'll never do it again. I hate writing indexes. But it pays so well that I sucker myself into doing it every time. Oy, I'm such a stupid sucker.

My ex is driving me insane. She really, really made me mad tonight. She seems to expect that I can drop everything at my actual job to deal with this, and I can't. She kept bugging me via email all day to call her with my copyedits/proofs of the book's introduction and I didn't have time to. Then at 4:00 my boss was like, you have to go to the redesign thing over at Rock Bottom Brewery, because all the proofers got invited, and I'm not going, and no one else wants to go, so you have to do it because our department is finally being thanked for something and somebody needs to put in an appearance.

Normally, you surely wouldn't have to push me out the door to go drink beer. But it was 96 degrees, there was a *&%ing Reds game tonight, I needed to call my ex and go over the edits, and Rock Bottom is in Fountain Square, which is a flippin' zoo any time of the day, let alone just before rush hour. Plus I was in a sour mood because I'd been dealing all day with a work project I hate in addition to attempting to grab a few minutes here and there to do an index I'm hating. So whatever. I typed up a quick list of my edits for her and told her she could call me at home tonight to talk about them, and I walked through the traffic and crowds and heat. I didn't even drink when I got there because it was just too hot. Yes, it was too hot to drink. I sat there for about forty minutes watching the account girl smoke her cigarettes and talk about the broken heel on her shoe and Sex in the City, and then I left and drove home.

I don't know why the ex was so insistent that I give her my edits by phone. I didn't want to call her because she was just going to bitch about how much NewGen sucks for fucking up on the copyediting and it would take a hundred years to go through everything because each edit would be punctuated by her going off on incompetent outsourced work. I don't think I was wrong to provide her with a written list. I thought that would be easier.

I expected her to call all night while I was sitting around sweating and working on chapter two, but the phone didn't ring at all. I just got online to check my email and there was a message from her to "phone the edits. It's really hard to read this list. If you're too busy, I'll find another indexer next time."

My immediate reaction was rage. I'm going out of my way to provide proofing and copyediting on this jacked-up manuscript when I'm only getting paid to index it, and she's demanding that I call her *while I'm at my regular job* with these edits and threatening to find someone else when I can't drop everything and deal with her mess? Yeah, that really makes me feel appreciated for the extra work I'm doing and for being her friend and not running away screaming, which I think any sane person would have done by now.

But--now, I am telling myself, it's really stupid to get upset over this. She is completely mentally unstable. In fact, she's a train wreck. She's a china cabinet falling over. She's a magnitude nine earthquake. And so, I am attempting to emotionally detach myself from my anger. Of course she can't appreciate the extra crap I'm doing for her. She can hardly string two coherent thoughts together to make a sentence at this point.

So tomorrow, when I'm even more emotionally detached, I'm going to write a diplomatic email explaining that when I have work to do at my job, that's my first priority, and that I've never let her down by turning in an index late before and I don't intend to start now, and that it hurts my feelings when she implies that she'll get someone else next time when I fail to live up to her unrealistic expectations. I'm not going to tell her that there won't be a next time. She'll find that out a year from now when she wants me to do another one and I turn her down.

I sure do bitch a lot on this blog. I bitch about the itch, about the weather, about my brother's wife, about my ex. Shit. I gotta stop all this bitching.

But before I do, allow me to bitch about the air quality.

















Sorry this is such a bitchy post. I'll be much more pleasant to read next week when this stupid index is finished. Also, apologies to those of you on whose blogs I regularly comment--hopefully I'll have a few minutes soon to get caught up on my blog reading.